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Summary: Probably one of the best books to come out of ANY war
Review: Although I've had "Fields of Fire" for years, I had never managed to read it until I read "The Nightengale's Song", which chronicled the lives of Webb and four other Naval Academy graduates (also a great book). I only regret that I had not read "Fields of Fire" years ago. It is one of the most honest, realistic, and gut-wrenching war novels I have ever read. I think it ranks with the likes of "The Killer Angels", "The Naked and the Dead", and "All Quiet on the Western Front" as one of the best novels written about ANY war.I did not serve in Viet Nam (I was in the Navy), so I won't pretend to truly understand how the grunt really experienced the war. However, I am certain that "Fields of Fire" probably comes closer to conveying an understanding than any book written on Viet Nam. I have read other, non-fiction accounts of platoon-level fighting in Viet Nam (e.g., "We Were Soldiers Once .. and Young" and "Steel My Soldiers' Hearts"), and the descriptions of everything from the nightly patrols, the constant sense of fear, and just the brutality of so much around them could have been interchanged with Webb's descriptions. Further, Webb, as a highly decorated Marine in Viet Nam, is qualified as few could be to have written this book - he lived it. Much is surely autobiographic. In short, one of the best books I have ever read, period.
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Summary: Great Book
Review: I would rank this as one of the best vietnam era novels I have read. The way james webb introduces and describes the characters really brings you into the book. This was one of those books that I felt disappointed when it was finished, I have re-read this book twice already and have only owned it for a few month's I would suggest this book to anyone interested in vietnam era novels and of course those that are not. This is a great book.
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Summary: fields of fire
Review: I have read many books about vietnam, this is by far the best one. I have read many times, between this and a novel called Sand in the Wind, they are both realistic in regards to a marine rifleman. semper fi
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Summary: THE CHARACTERS MATTER
Review: Good fiction always gets you involved in the characters. I gaurantee you will care about the grunts that Webb sends into the An Hoa Basin (the Arizona Terriotory) under the leadership of Lt. Robert E. Lee Hodges, Jr., a southern boy with a rich heritage of warrior blood. In the course of the narrative, Hodges falls in love with an Okinawan woman that works in the officer's mess at Camp Hansen on Okinawa, or "the Rock" as we called it when I was there eons ago. Then there is "Snake," an unsavory product of the slums that seems the antithesis of Hodges. Yet, the two bond in the field, and much of the narrative centers around them. You're pulling for Hodges to make it back to the girl on Okinawa. You're pulling for Snake to make it good in the Marine Corps, which has given him a new start on life. Enter Goodrich, a whining and whimpy over-priveleged Harvard student whose best friend has fled to Canada to avoid getting drafted. Goodrich is a fascinating study in analysis paralysis. He alienates himself from his comrades and spends inordinate amounts of time agonizing over the morality of the war and the [pros and cons] of his fellow grunts' actions in the war. He is the consummate "effete snob" about whom Vice-President Spiro Agnew once declaimed. However, it's only a matter of time before Goodrich effects the action that brings this powerful novel to a climax. In the end, we see Goodrich speaking before a Harvard anti-war rally, but he has gone through a major sea-change and embarrasses the peacenik leaders that wanted to use him for a mascot. This novel is a pretty fast read. The descriptions are vivid and poetic. The dialogue bears the ring of truth. Webb himself served in the Marine Corps in Vietnam and knows of what he speaks. I would rate this novel, along with "The 13th Valley," as one of the two best Vietnam novels written to date.
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Summary: Hopeless heroism
Review: I bought this book because it was recommended by Tom Wolfe in 'Hooking up' as 'In my opinion the finest of the Vietnam novels'. I have not read many Vietnam novels, but I agree that this is a very good one. Looking through the eyes of several different players, you get an insight in some of the viewpoints of the insanity called war. Snake, who got his Marine tattoo before boot camp, born to fight, never fitting in, until this war came along and gave him friends to die for. Hodges, who raised himself as a Marine, modelling himself after his dead father. Bagger, father of a little baby, scared of [messing] up, overwhelmed by the calamities of adulthood. Goodrich, a shameful coward, spending more time battling his conscience, than his enemies. All are heroes, but not the easy 'save some lives and get a medal' kind, but more of a stubborn, helpless, accepting gritty kind with an aura of uselessness around it. Maybe heroes isn't even the right word. Human. With all the fears and cravings and feelings of hope and friendship we come with. James Webb gave some of those who died their face back and I am grateful for it.
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Summary: Powerful, moving. In its way very like "The Deer Hunter"
Review: "Fields of Fire" is to books about Viet Nam as "The Deer Hunter" is to movies on the subject. Just as "The Deer Hunter" made all other Nam movies irrelevant, "Fire" leaves all other Viet Nam war books looking shallow. Webb sees war through the eyes and lives of those men most used up by it, as did "The Deer Hunter". He has a profound respect for those Americans from the lower and lower-middle classes who fought this conflict for the rest of us. His inner-city white punk "Snake" gets as much background and love from the author as does his wellborn warrior, Lt. Hodges (Hodges probably based on Webb himself). Less than 50% of American men who came of draft age during Viet Nam ever entered the service, less than 20% of those who entered ever saw Viet Nam. Do the arithmetic: less than 10% of American men, less than 5% of the then eligible aged population ever served there. How easy it has been to see the war as simply wrong, justifying our own draft dodging as moral. Webb's book is full of the raw truth about those who fought there and those who refused. The men who answered the call, whether the call was wrong or right (the call was never theirs to make), are saluted in "Fields of Fire". It's about time. A reviewer from Georgia tells of a graduate seminar in English that spent its time attacking this book..."Fields of Fire" in its honesty becomes as anti-war as "The Deer Hunter". Who, upon reading this book, would ever want to fight that war or any war for this nation?
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Summary: Vietnam
Review: This is a remarkable book. Gripping, vivid, frightening. More than just about any other war book I can think of, Fields of Fire peels back the thin veneer of civilization and shows the muck underneath. War isn't pretty, and books that make it appear so aren't just banal -- they do a disservice to those who serve in future wars, as well as those who send them there. James Webb, on the other hand, tells it like it is -- bloody, brutal and final. As a Gulf War veteran and a writer (Prayer at Rumayla), I have long admired Webb for his incredibly good story.
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Summary: Right on.
Review: The thing I most like about Fields of Fire is the emphasis it puts on showing how things in Vietnam operated. I've read other pieces about the war where the author takes a somewhat trippy approach and dwells on a few enlisted men doing and experiencing surreal, terrible things. I've enjoyed those kinds of stories from a literary perspective, but they don't really give much insight into what was going on. Webb ventures beyond the viewpoint of some prototypical disoriented recruit and shows more of the actual military operations: what it was like for the lieutenants, how Marine platoons were organized and run, what the day-to-day procedures were. True, Webb's characters don't have the depth of some. He's working with an ensemble cast, and he's trying to get a lot of information in. If you're looking for a character study, you might try Kent Anderson's Sympathy For the Devil and its sequel Night Dogs, which do just the opposite of Fields of Fire: follow a single character before, during, and long after the war, without a lot of attention to sequence, context, or minutiae. But I'd have to say Fields of Fire is stronger: the ensemble is diverse, and none of the characters are stereotypical or even flat. Likewise, Webb's prose is not perfect, but he never holds forth. One other book that goes well with Fields of Fire is The Nightingale's Song, by Robert Timberg. Among other things, Timberg writes about Webb's life and what went into Fields of Fire. But this is an excellent book even without a counterpoint or a companion piece.
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Summary: Perfect Gift for Young Marines
Review: This book is perfect for introducing young Marines to combat literature. Not only is it well plotted, but it deals with situations that Marines are likely to encounter in combat. It entertains and it teaches. It is a great book to spark discussions about courage in combat, the necessity for obedience to orders, about war crimes and numerous other topics. I buy this book every Christmas for all my Corporals and below and I have Professional Military Instruction every January based on it.
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Summary: The "Stab-in-the-Back" Version of Vietnam
Review: There are basically three types of fictions (or I might go so far as to say texts) about Vietnam. The first kind shows the war as an immoral and criminal episode in American history; the second shows it as a sort of "tragedy without villains" and the third portrays it as a "noble cause." Each type of fiction is aligned with a certain political viewpoint: left, center, and right, respectively. A good example of the first kind of novel is Stephen Wright's "Meditations in Green" or Victor Kolpacoff's "The Prisoners of Quai Dong" (which depict, at merciless length, scenes of Americans torturing Vietnamese); the second type would be something along the lines of Tim O'Brien's "Going After Cacciato" or "The THings They Carried" (which subtly imply that both Vietnamese and Americans were to blame for the war). James Webb's novel falls squarely into the third category. It's an unapologetically right-wing take on why the war was fought and why it was lost. In spirit it recalls the "Freikorps" literature of post-WWI Germany, in which German former-soldiers turned writers (like Ernst Junger) countered the general pessimism of the post-war literary scene by celebrating the war and its cause. Webb writes the war along the lines of a "stab in the back myth" similar to that of the Freikorps literature--the war was lost not because the cause was unjust, but because flaky communist-duped civilians back home betrayed the very men who were fighting in their name. Literary critics and academics have naturally given this novel short shrift. It is unfair, however, to say that Webb has no gifts as a writer, or that his characters are two-dimensional cardboard cutouts. They all develop in interesting ways. I imagine that people who don't like the novel's politics say "there's no character development" precisely because they don't care for the way in which the main character, PFC Goodrich, develops. When we meet him, he is full of the moral certainties of the antiwar protesters and draft-dodgers; by the end of the novel several things have happened to make him question all of his earlier premises. In a nutshell, Goodrich is gradually transformed from a dove to a hawk, and the transformation is pretty credible. Regardless of what your politics are, Webb's novel deserves your attention if you are interested at all in the Vietnam War. If you are a platoon leader in a combat or combat support unit, you should consider it required reading. Sure, the writing can be clumsy at points, but Webb's clumsiness is no worse than that of writers like Jack London, Richard Wright, Theodore Dreiser, or Norman Mailer.
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